HoP 500c Troels Engberg-Pedersen on St Paul and the Stoics
History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
In this milestone episode of the History of Philosophy podcast, host Peter Adamson interviews Troels Engberg-Pedersen about how Stoic philosophy profoundly shaped St. Paul's early Christian theology and ethics. They explore Paul's
Key takeaways
- St. Paul wrote seven genuine letters between 49-55 CE, predating the Gospels and heavily influencing early Christian theology.
- Engberg-Pedersen identifies three stages of Stoic influence on Paul: direct conceptual borrowing (e.g., prokope for progress), structural parallels in moral exhortation (paranesis), and philosophical argumentation using Greco-Roman frameworks like akrasia.
Main topics
- Stoicism and early Christianity
- St. Paul's letters and authorship
Notable quotes
"Paul could well be both a master of Jewish and what we later call Christian theology and also a person who was deeply familiar with Greco-Roman philosophy."
Conclusion
The episode reframes St. Paul not merely as a theologian but as a philosopher deeply
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:07) Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be another installment of our mini-series in which we celebrate reaching 500 episodes by going back to touch on a few topics I skipped over in previous series of the podcast. And today I'm joined by Troels Engberg-Petersen, who's Emeritus Professor of New Testament Exegesis at the University of Copenhagen. And he's joining me to talk about St. Paul, especially with reference to Stoicism. Hello, Troels. Thank you so much for joining me. Speaker 1 (0:44) Hello. It's good to be here. I look very much forward to this. Yeah, me too. I have to admit, this Speaker 2 (0:49) is a topic that I didn't so much neglect. or not think of covering, as with some of the others we're doing in this miniseries, but I deliberately decided not to tackle anything about the New Testament. The blood was very naughty of you. Well, it was perhaps cowardly. But I just thought, oh, you know, I don't even know where I would start. But since then, I figured out where I would start. Namely, I would ask you. Right. So can you, we're not actually going to talk about the whole New Testament here. We're going to focus on St. Paul. Can you start us off with a quick introduction to him? So who was he? What texts do we have by him as part of the New Testament? Speaker 1 (1:28) Paul was and is, I think, an enormously important figure in the whole Western tradition of both theology and philosophy. As for theology... He's the earliest witness to what we now call Christianity. Everybody knows that. The seven so-called letters that go into the New Testament were probably written between 49 of the Common Era and 55 of the Common Era. And that is, well, about 15 to 30 years before the Gospels. In the Gospel of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, they were written later. It's very important to remember that. Actually, scholars are right now... working on showing that the gospel explanation of Jesus in that case is strongly influenced by Paul, even though the two literary genres of Pauline data and gospel narrative are so different. He's enormously important in the New Testament itself. What we're talking about are seven so-called genuine letters by him. First Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, first and second Corinthians, and Romans, and then a small personal one to a guy called Philemon. Then there are other so-called Pauline letters in the New Testament, but they are pseudo-Pauline. His importance for philosophy comes out, for instance, in the fact that between, say, 1995 and 2020, a range of modern philosophers have been reading and writing about Paul. He started with Alain Badiou, who wrote a book called St. Paul and the Foundation of Universalism in 1997. He was and is an atheist, as are also other people who have written in the same line. Who was Paul? We don't know that much about it. He came from Tarsus in southeast Turkey, and this was a pretty interesting intellectual Greek city. Two school leaders of Stoicism came from Tarsus. They also had a famous gymnasium, and one wonders, did Paul go to that gymnasium? And we just don't know. But his Greek is splendid. But here it is very important to remember that he was a Jew and he remained a Jew even when he became a Christ believer. His knowledge of the Jewish Bible is splendid and he quotes it again and again. But it is again the Greek Jewish Bible, the Septuagint. I think there is a lesson for us here. Paul could well be both a master of Jewish and what we later call Christian theology. and also a person who was deeply familiar with Greco-Roman philosophy. To see an opposition here reflects an understanding that is by now wholly antiquated. But it may be the reason why you only bring in Paul now into your own series. Yeah, Speaker 2 (4:27) maybe. I think that's a really interesting point that there's the approach to Paul that thinks of him as a Jewish figure and the approach to Paul that thinks of him as a Greek figure. But actually, this is kind of a historical, right? Because at the time, there was no contradiction between the two. I mean, we could even think about someone like Philo of Alexandria, actually. So, who I did cover, in all fairness to me. So, he's a Jewish philosopher who's drawing a lot on Plato, but also commenting on the Old Testament, right? Speaker 1 (4:57) Yeah, absolutely. And he's also drawing on Stoicism. It's a mixture of Plato and Stoicism, even though Plato plays perhaps the larger role in Plato. Right. Speaker 2 (5:07) Now, you already gave us a couple of hints in the direction of explaining why he might know something about Stoicism. So, he comes from... town where he could have maybe studied or maybe even read Stoic philosophers. At one point in your book on, in one of your books on this, you say that trying to figure out exactly what he knew about Stoicism and how it would be a matter of speculation. Speaker 1 (5:31) Yeah. Speaker 2 (5:32) Just between you, me, and the entire internet. Speaker 1 (5:35) Do you want to amplify on that? Oh, yes. I think there are three answers here. So this question, how much did he actually know of Stoicism? One may begin with stage one from saying, well, Paul does make use of some concepts that are specifically Stoic. Here I would mention, for instance, he speaks about doing tamme kasekonta, which means duties, and that's a specifically Stoic concept. Or elsewhere he speaks about progress prokopē. of the gospel and of the Philippians, etc. And that is also a specific Listeric concept. But if my only big cases are, well, a more or less haphazard use, then there is a second stage where we can notice that he, throughout his letters, constantly engages in what we more technically call paranesis, that is, moral exhortation. He himself does not employ that word, but his practice of paranesis completely fits what we may learn about Stoic paranesis in two letters by Paul's Stoic contemporary Seneca. And that is also why, and this is a curious thing, I think, why in the later theological tradition about Paul, one speaks... precisely and rightly of the Paulian paranesis, even though Paul himself uses a different word for it. He speaks of paraklesis and parakaline, which we may translate as encouragement and encourage. So there's an interesting play there, but the fact is that paranesis, which he is doing, that is something centrally important to Stoicism. Then there is a third stage. at use of Stoicism in trying to elucidate and explain what Paul is himself aiming to say about the Christ face that he is constantly describing. Here one might use Stoicism to show that Paul is himself doing philosophy in spelling out to his adversaries what this Christ face is all about. We may come back to that, but let me just give you one example. In Romans chapter 7, he describes what living under the Jewish law of Moses meant to a Jew before the arrival of Christ. As he describes it, it's a matter of constantly risking transgressing the law. Ball here clearly describes this situation by drawing on the Greco-Roman philosophical concept of akrasia. As your listeners may... No, this concept was thoroughly developed by Aristotle, and it also lies behind the Stoic concept of the passions, of which one should in Stoicism get altogether read. That is exactly what Paul then goes on to describe in Romans chapter 8, when Jews have come to have Christ's face, and when they have then also received the spirit in Greek, the pneuma, which is also a distinctly Stoic concept. Then, as he says, and now you have to listen, the righteous demand of the Jewish law will be fulfilled. Then believers have, as he says elsewhere, become perfect. This, as I claim, is Paul himself doing philosophy. And we can see that by drawing on our own knowledge of Greco-Roman philosophy and seeing that Paul is himself arguing like that. In this sense, I think one can say that he has been infused by Gregorow philosophy. And I think also that this may help us as modern philosophers to understand better what he may also describe in distinctly mythological language. We may come back to that. Speaker 2 (9:21) Yeah. And in fact, I wanted to ask you later about this concept of the Pnur. Sure. Maybe we can start with a more basic thing. And this, I think, connects to... the topic of paranesis, which you just mentioned, which is the idea in both St. Paul and his understanding of Christianity and Stoicism. In both cases, you have this idea of a kind of radical transformation of the agent. So in Stoicism, the idea would be, well, people are completely foolish. and ignorance, and then somehow through philosophy, they could come to become a perfect sage, right? They could acquire virtue. This would be a very radical change. And of course, becoming a Christian would be a very radical change for St. Paul too, right? So you see a parallel between these, right? Speaker 1 (10:05) Exactly. And I noticed that you used the term parallel because it does help a lot so that we do not become... well,